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Del (![[info]](http://www.journalfen.net/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} big_bad_wolf) wrote,@ 2007-08-09 19:07:00 |
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PART TWO.
PART ONE
The rain was still lurking threateningly about the grounds come Monday, ambushing Jack every time he made a move towards the tennis courts even in jest, and drenching him in a brief but thorough shower when he took the dogs out. He had fundamentally resigned himself to a day of squishy socks and the evocative smell of wet wool in his nostrils when the sun came out in a blaze of glory and nearly blinded him with the thousands of reflections from every puddle.
Dazzled and damp, Jack returned to the house for breakfast and found Lady Diana nursing a hangover. "One too many nightcaps," she explained, looking comical in her dark glasses – especially as she'd still apparently taken the time to set her hair. "No laughing or I shall … visit dire punishments on you. I can't think of any now – too tired – but trust me they will be every bit as ghastly as this headache."
Jack viewed the two places set for breakfast with a discreet eye, and raised his eyebrows at her.
"Worn out, apparently," Lady Diana supplied. "So I have you to myself today. Normally I'd jump at the chance," she didn't sound particularly enthusiastic or sincere, "but – well." She grimaced. "Go and organise the library or something. You're breathing too loudly."
Jack saluted sarcastically and trooped off, making a point of marching as heavily as he could until Lady Diana shouted, "ARSE" after him and flinched at the volume of her own voice.
The library was in a state of continual and advanced disarray – Lady Diana admitted that she'd never really got into the habit of putting books back on any shelf when she'd finished with them, never mind the one they'd come from, and so stack upon stack and slithery pile overlapping scree of hardbacks littered every available flat surface amongst the almost-bare shelves in the high-ceilinged room – but Jack was in no mood for playing librarian. He wasn't sure if he'd ever been in the appropriate mood for a task that involved quite so much tedious shuffling about and caring about order.
Jack made it through most of the maze of papers before something caught his eye – an oversized sheet of yellowing paper spread out over a desk, tucked away at the back of the room. It turned out to be a family tree. Jack assumed it must have been a project of the late Mr. Beckett (his title having temporarily slipped Jack's mind) as Lady Diana showed a refreshing lack of interest in genealogy.
With a rapidly sinking heart he scanned the bottom line of the chart until he found the date he was looking for; there, John Clemens Fairford, Lahore, a date almost exactly nine months after his affair with Ann Parker had ended. Shit.
Jack thumped the family tree in frustration and part of the paper crackled off. There was no guarantee it was the same woman, he thought desperately, and even if it was – she was married, and from what he remembered of smirking politely at her cuckolded husband, to a hale and virile gentleman (with enormous moustaches of the kind Jack could never grow). It was entirely possible that, after his little incident on the train had forced him to flee to Calcutta, that 'Ann Parker' had thrown herself back into her marriage by way of consolation. Not just possibly but wholly likely.
He gently relaxed his clenched fists into looser shapes and took a steadying breath. It was fine. He was not littering up time with his illegitimate brood. For all he knew the thing that had rendered him unable to die had also left him infertile – it would after all be poetic justice that he be incapable of creating life now that he couldn't lose his own.
Jack backed away from the chart as though it was an adder he'd disturbed and decided that his time would be better spent – he looked out of the window at the miserable sweat-inducing drizzle – clearing weeds from around the outhouses at the bottom of the field.
Returning to the house around five to change for dinner, he was greeted with an exasperated, "I had no idea the library was so muddy. Is that goose-grass in your hair?" from his patron, but no real issue was raised over his absence. In fact, she looked positively refreshed to have been free of him for the majority of the daylight hours.
Jack bathed slowly, until the water in his tub was quite tepid, and dressed just as sluggishly. The bow-tie amused him, and he spent a moment or two informing the mirror that his name was Bond, James Bond – once he'd finally knotted it correctly. Or thought he had – he stepped out into the corridor just as Staveson was passing, and the old man groaned as though Jack had punched him in the stomach, and made him stand still while he retied it.
Lady Diana seized upon him before he could get to the bottom of the stairs. "They're not here yet," she muttered, which Jack had rather guessed, since she wasn't down there making nice to them. "But I want to give you a friendly warning – do not fuck this up for my nephew. The Cunninghams are vulgar people and frankly I'd rather not associate with them at all, but they are very wealthy and God only knows this family is need serious need of a financial kick in the posterior, by whatever means necessary. The old man has fifteen glue, varnish and polish factories all churning out goods – " she gave him a slightly hunted look, " – he will go on about that for hours. Bloody hours. His daughter has air for brains and her laugh goes right through my head but she's pretty enough and Johnny will blasted well get engaged to her –"
"Does he know this yet?"
"He's been primed," Lady Diana said grimly, "and you are to tell the Cunninghams you served with him. He saved your life or something of that ilk."
"I'm his character reference?" Jack asked, a little delighted by the sheer underhandedness of it all.
"Bingo." Lady Diana patted him on both upper arms like a mafia don. "If you want to continue living in my house, using up all my hot water and emptying the larder at all hours of the night, Jack, you'll co-operate."
Jack kissed her abruptly on the mouth, and she batted him hastily away. "Not in public, you ass."
"Operation Get Johnny Married is go, ma'am."
"Don't you ma'am me," she cocked her head. "Hear that?"
"Car engine?"
"They have a brand new motorcar," she sounded utterly disgusted. "Absurd. As if the roads around here were remotely suited to it." Lady Diana adjusted her stole and rapped Jack in the chest with her knuckles. "Remember. Best behaviour. Make my boy look good."
"Yes, Lady Diana," Jack saluted, and she sighed and hobbled down the stairs at a speed that belied her uneven gait.
The Cunninghams were a strangely-matched menagerie, Jack thought as he was introduced to them. Albert was a frumpy, stolid beach ball of a man who'd tried to grow a patriarch's whiskers and failed, from the looks of things, and had to settle for a toothbrush on his upper lip instead. Most unfashionable (Jack currently sported a pencil, the cutting edge of facial hair), and he looked like he'd learned his manners from a book at short notice.
His wife, the lovely Mrs. Sarah Cunningham, gave the very definite impression of showgirl done good. It was there in the way she moved her head and the way she wore her make-up – thick, as though she was used to applying it herself to withstand the glare of footlights and stand out in a dim club.
Their daughter – Jack could almost see Johnny's soul shrivelling up in horror as the two were introduced – was spot on eighteen, a bottle-blonde with thick eyelashes and a look of mania gleaming under her modestly-dressed exterior. She looked like she wanted to cut loose and do something irrational. She looked like she was itching for a cigarette if not more. She looked like she belonged in parties in London where half the party-goers got arrested for sodomy and indecency; in short, Elizabeth Cunningham looked like Jack's kind of girl, and like she was all wrong for a man who still had the creeping horrors every night.
He introduced himself politely and distantly, but he saw her flush and twitch and smile at him with a look of distinct interest that had been absent when she greeted Johnny. Fuck. Lady Diana was going to pulverise him.
"Fish-based and horse-based so far," Mr. Cunningham said over the soup course, "but we're looking into oil derivatives and expansion into lubricants for engines. The mechanised age is here to stay, in my opinion."
Elizabeth fidgeted in her seat and all but yawned into her glass of water; beside her, Johnny gazed miserably through his soup as though hypnotised by it; Lady Diana made a pained noise of encouragement to Mr. Cunningham, and to Jack's left Mrs. Cunningham asked him with a sad-eyed smile if he had ever been to New York, and how he found life in England.
With a healthy (and perhaps unwise) dollop of the usual charm Jack told her he'd never been to New York, he came from Chicago (pulling names out of nowhere), and he began singing England's fulsome and not entirely deserved praises as he kicked Johnny's foot under the table, just as Lady Diana pinched him surreptitiously in the side.
Johnny jerked upright guiltily and asked Elizabeth to pass the pepper. It was, Jack thought wearily, a start at least.
The fish course did a little more for the dinner table conversation: showing a surprising degree of sensitivity, Mr. Cunningham diverted the topic from fish-based adhesive manufacturing and onto the business of motorcar maintenance, a subject on which Elizabeth proved to be quite passionate and often loud enough that Jack felt her mother's leg whip out under the table to catch her in the shin. With this amount of foot-based conversational guidance going on, they were sure to all be too crippled to socialise by the end of the meal.
Jack watched Johnny strike up cautious conversation about the merits of the Bugatti Type 23 over the Delage CO, heaved a sigh of relief and buried himself in the business of eating. Eating, and trying to avoid Mrs. Cunningham's inviting hand on his thigh.
After-dinner drinks served as the warning beacon for the downhill turn of the evening – Johnny mumbled something about needing to step outside for some air, his face flushed, and Jack followed him without caution or excuse.
He discovered the young man just beside the ugly pillars that flanked the front door, vomiting explosively into a rose bush. A moment or two of back rubbing later Johnny was composed enough to croak, "I told you I couldn't hold my drink," and sink onto his toes in a wobbly crouch.
"How much did you have?" Jack asked, sitting down beside him on the step in a manner intended to be responsible and comforting and not at all paternal.
"Not much. Less than you."
"I have a cast-iron stomach. You don't want to try keeping up with me."
"I had noticed," Johnny passed his hands over his face, unsticking his sweaty hair from his forehead. "At least I kept my mouth shut, eh?"
"Oh?" Jack asked carefully.
"Yes," Johnny said, slurring just enough that Jack know the confidence he was about to receive was one he shouldn't be hearing, "before we came over mother got blind at the embassy – absolutely rotten, and told me – " he slid down on his heels until his back touched the pillar behind him and his head bounced off it with a crack like a rifle shot – seemingly without him noticing, "She told me I'm a bastard." He covered his mouth with his hand. Jack couldn't tell if he was ashamed of the word or nauseous again. "Some soldier, she said." He looked wistful.
"How did she know you're not … you know … your father's?"
Johnny made a face. "Apparently my father – " he hiccupped painfully, "an otherwise excellent man, mark you – has a little bit of a problem with the old chap." Johnny demonstrated precisely what problem with a surprisingly vulgar gesture involving a limp wrist. "Not what I wanted for my nineteenth birthday. Happy – hic – birthday, Johnny, you're ille –hic- git – ti – ma - … a bastard."
"But the Colonel – "
"Long as no one else knows, I'm his son, right? He wanted one," Johnny said, leaning back again and nearly missing the pillar this time. Jack grabbed him by the elbow to steady him and ended up putting a supportive arm across his shoulders. They sat this way for some time, the cold night air blowing through Jack's hair and stirring Johnny's.
"I say, Mr. Harkness," called a dampened voice from the doorway. Elizabeth Cunningham peered around at them and said with a glint in her eye that would have showed up in a coal cellar, "I say. D'you and your friend want to come to a rather terrific party?"
Jack glanced at Johnny, who had his eyes shut and looked positively deathsome, and was about to tell her regretfully that they'd have to pass on the offer when Johnny, without cracking open an eyelid, muttered:
"Please yes dear god."
"Are you sure?" Jack asked, peering at Johnny's pale, sweating face with genuine concern. "You don't look up to it."
"I'm sick of the quiet out here," Johnny explained, doing little to break it, "I want to go somewhere with dancing and people who aren't looking at me as though I'm contagious."
"That's the spirit," Elizabeth said cheerfully. "It's at Stourhead. The way I drive we'll be there in two hours at the most."
"You're driving?" Jack asked, helping Johnny to his feet. The lad's skin was clammy and his heart racing. Jack had never seen someone take a few drinks so badly before.
"It's my car. Of course I'm driving." Elizabeth produced a pair of diving goggles from her handbag. "I do hope that's not going to be a problem, Mr. Harkness. I didn't have you pegged for a kill-joy at all. I don't want to have to leave you here to your own miserable devices."
"Do your parents know you're taking their car?" Jack asked warily, sliding into the passenger side as Johnny sprawled over the rear seats in a rather endearingly ungainly manner.
"Of course not. It wouldn't be half as fun if they knew!" Elizabeth snorted. As the car began to coast gently down the approach she added, "We shall have to stop before we get to the house so I can change out of this frumpy old rag – it just wouldn't be the thing to show up at one of Enid's evenings looking like an old maid, it's just unthinkable."
"Stop where?" Johnny asked from behind them. Jack turned. He seemed to be benefiting from the cold wind on his face.
"A bush, a tree – " Elizabeth made a dismissive gestured and clamped her hand back on the wheel. "- does it matter?"
"A bush?" Johnny said faintly.
"I'm sure that, both being perfect gentlemen, you'll avert your gaze while I whip this old thing off and put on something a little more daring."
"Perfect gentlemen," Jack echoed. Elizabeth's hand was heavy on his leg.
"Jack, be a darling and have a look in my handbag? There should be a gold compact with a swan on it in the front compartment. I rather fancy some cocaine."
"While driving?" Jack asked incredulously, rooting about in her back and feeling very silly doing it.
"It's medicinal!" Elizabeth said without even an attempt at being convincing. "It helps me concentrate."
"I don't doubt it," said Jack, who did. "But what I meant was – won't it get blown everywhere by the wind?"
"Dash it, I hadn't thought of that. Open it below the screen, there? That's right. Now get up a spoonful – bigger than that, I'm not an infant! – and press your thumb over it so – "
Jack did as he was told, and by a curious process not wholly unlike feeding peas to an obstinate and finicky toddler, got the required amount of cocaine to their driver.
For the rest of the journey Jack learnt an awful lot about Elizabeth, Elizabeth's stridently-held opinions (who knew it was possible to be passionate about being undecided?), Elizabeth's friend Molly ("She's American too. Maybe you know her? I can't remember her last name but she's simply divine, you must have met,") who was a singer, and most of all about Elizabeth's hair-raising driving. He cast occasional envious glances back at a dozing Johnny in the brief moments when Elizabeth paused for breath.
He let her hand crawl all over his leg like a stoned arachnid and leapt out of the car to push the machine out of the ditch Elizabeth had driven it into – twice. The third time it was a field, mercifully empty of livestock, and Johnny came down to help, and they both got plastered in mud up to the knee.
"Marvellous," Elizabeth giggled as they set off again, "this is just perfect! I can tell Enid I found you both growing in a field of soldiers and plucked you up for her party."
Johnny and Jack exchanged a pained glance but held their peace.
They stopped inside the grounds but outside the house so that Elizabeth could dart behind a spectacular folly and emerge twenty minutes later wearing a knee-length thing in shimmering gold that made her look like a twelve-year-old boy in make-up. Jack applauded nonetheless.
Their guide slapped the doorknocker impatiently, cigarette-holder poking out of her mouth like a porcupine's quill, and the door was answered by a tired-looking footman and a drunk-looking woman in her late twenties who was carrying a small dog. "Lizzie! Splendid! We were just getting started and wondering how fashionably detained you were going to be. Just wouldn't have been the same without you, darling."
Elizabeth simpered unexpectedly; Jack had not pegged her for the kind of woman who simpered. "I brought some chaps along. I'm afraid they're a bit grubby from my driving – "
"Well, at least they're still alive," Enid drawled. "So I suppose you must be improving." She waved an admonishing finger under the young lady's nose and smirked. "You'd go a deal better if you opened your eyes when taking corners."
"Oh, where's the thrill?" Elizabeth flapped the advice away with her cigarette smoke. "Anyway, this is Jack Harkness – "
Jack dipped to kiss Enid's hand and the small dog growled at him, so he made a big show of taking the little bastard's forepaw and kissing that, too. It showed him his teeth. Jack showed his back.
"- and – blast! I've forgotten your name."
"Fairford. Johnny Fairford."
"How very excellent," Enid pulled them inside and shut the door, raising her voice to an immediate wall-shaking bellow. "GILLARD! Where are the drinks for my new guests? Hop along, you old goat."
"None for me, thanks," Johnny said. "Just point me at the music."
"This way," Enid took Johnny's hand and dragged him down the hall like a dog on a lead. Trapped between her arm and her breast, the tiny Yorkshire terrier began yapping indignantly. Jack took Elizabeth's arm and followed.
There came a room filled with cigarette smoke and the scent, under this, of rose water. Somewhere in the gloom two string instruments – a bass and a piano – were engaged in a deadly musical battle while a giggling trumpet refereed; now and then Jack caught a glimpse of the musicians but the partygoers for the most part blocked his view. They wore suits and costumes, and very little at all: one young lady had apparently come as a Muse and was lounging about with one breast hanging out, and a man of maybe nineteen was darting about dressed as Cupid, his heavily made-up eyelids drooping narcotically over dark brown eyes.
Jack found himself filled with a feeling like a kind of contented homecoming. This was his natural environment. Throw in an orgy a little later and perhaps a gunfight and it would be a truly swinging party.
As the acoustic battlefield settled into some epileptic jitter that was only dance music if you had five legs, Jack seized Johnny by the hand and said, "care to dance?"
And dance they did. Johnny danced like he'd been taught to dance by people who weren't meant to be teaching him anything, and later learnt to not quite cover it up with something more decent – he looked like the two-way cultural fight of colonialism embodied in arm movements. He looked good. Jack forgot himself and forgot anachronism and just threw himself into the music like a lunatic against an asylum wall, every flat and squeak and bum note just another way of touching rhythm. He danced until sweat stuck his shirt squarely to his back, until his feet felt like wings.
Until the song, or approximation thereof, ended, and one of the musicians wandered off to stuff more "naughty salt" up his nose, and the remaining two couldn't keep up quite the same tempo even with guests tapping encouragement on whatever flat surfaces they could find.
Johnny put a hand against the wall to steady himself, a movement which would have been more effective had said wall not been eight feet away, and said unsteadily, "I think I need to lie down now."
Jack refrained from saying "I told you this would happen" and instead grabbed Enid unceremoniously by the elbow as she passed. Her rotten little dog snarled at him but they both ignored it. "Do you have a guest room we could – uh. That doesn't sound very good."
Enid smirked – it seemed to be her only expression – and said, "up the larger stairs, third on the left, has a bolt on the door for precisely guests like you Mr. – Harken, was it?"
"Something like that," Jack said with an appalling smile, not bothering to correct her on either front. He got a hold of Johnny's upper arm instead and gave it a tug. "Come on. I found you somewhere to sleep it off."
Johnny shambled and bowed at the knees but otherwise made his way relatively unsupported – Jack kept a steadying arm on his shoulder, just in case – and leant heavily on the wall while Jack wrestled the stiff door open.
"There," he said, shutting the door behind them. "I should probably get back down to the …" he didn't want to, of course, but there was the not incurring the volcanic wrath of Lady Diana to think of. He trailed off, though, because Johnny had straightened up and tossed his hair out of his eyes, looking the very picture of sobriety if not of sanity.
The change was sudden and electric, and Jack permitted himself a low groan; things like this tended to go one of two ways, and he really hoped it was heading for the ending with the sweaty grunting nudity and not the one where Johnny peeled his face off and turned out to be something that needed shooting before it laid eggs in Jack's spinal column. He was quite fed up with that ending.
"I thought you wanted to lie down," he pointed out carefully.
"Eventually," Johnny said, taking off his dinner jacket and throwing it at the chair by the bed. He gave Jack the kind of smile that Jack recognised from that time he'd accidentally-on-purpose time-looped himself and ended up having good but extremely narcissistic sex with himself.
"Oh I see," Jack said, flashing the same one back. "What happened to 'couldn't possibly' and 'psychiatric doctors'?"
"I just gave a very convincing performance of still being blind drunk, and you half-carried me up the stairs," Johnny said, holding Jack's gaze as he moved closer. "If tongues do get excitable they'll say you took advantage of an inebriated and confused young man," Johnny went on with a mock sigh of pain, "I am frequently drunk and confused, and taken advantage of, Jack. They'll understand. You might not be so lucky."
Jack shrugged and put his hands on Johnny's hips, pulling him across the remaining distance with a gentle but deliberate tug. "I have my own ways of avoiding trouble." He peeled one of Johnny's braces off his shoulder and laid his hand where it had rested, cupped his fingers around the back of Johnny's neck, danced agonisingly slow patterns on the soft skin there, and pulled Johnny's mouth towards him.
Johnny stiffened. "I don't kiss – "
"You do now," Jack said, and kissed him. He put everything into it – A Jack Harkness Knicker-Dropper Glory, they called them the first time he'd been around in the second World War. He pressed his lips to Johnny's, slid his hand from Johnny's hip to the small of his back, half-opened his mouth and – bingo – there was the buckle in Johnny's knees, there was the surrender in his mouth.
Jack softened up, pulled away a little, and was rewarded with an open mouth and a delicately probing tongue, and just the barest hint of a moan into his mouth. Jack pulled back abruptly, hands still in place, leaving Johnny temporarily gaping for him, and whispered against his cheek, "Let me guess, all those other drunken moments: brief and hard against the wall of the mess? You're a fool, Johnny." He snatched a swift kiss and once again left the man chasing his mouth as he pulled away. "Did you never want anything more than that?"
"There is nothing more for men like us," Johnny said a little sadly, his hands working on untucking Jack's shirt which, without unbuttoning his high-waisted trousers, was not going to be a magnificent success.
Jack seized Johnny's wrists in his hands and bashed them together. "You," he said, his mouth brushing Johnny's with each letter, "are so wrong about that I can hardly tell you." He released Johnny's wrists, plucked the other brace from his shoulder and stood back (keeping himself from burying his hands in the man's hair, his lips in his neck and his hips against his arse was proving an effort of supreme will). "Undress," he said pleasantly.
"All of it?" Johnny looked perplexed.
"I'm not about to make love to your trousers. Yes, all of it," Jack said, and nearly inhaled his lower lip as he bit on it, trapping the sigh as Johnny unbuttoned down over his chest and stomach, removed his collar and cast it aside, and undid the first of his trouser buttons; as he revealed the curve of his breastbone swathed in vest, the almost-concave expanse of his stomach and – as he struggled away his sleeves – the pale, slightly bony hemispheres of his shoulders. His lightly-freckled collarbone. His throat. Jack swallowed hard.
"Why must I – "
Jack stopped his mouth with another kiss, which unfortunately also put paid to any more of this bizarre and clumsy strip-tease. He undid Johnny's trousers himself, forcing his hands steady, forcing himself to take it slow and calm instead of bashing their hips together, instead of sliding a hot hand inside his underwear the minute he could and making a beeline for Johnny's cock. Jack untucked his vest, yanked it upwards, and as they broke the kiss, as Johnny raised his arms above his head to help Jack wriggle him out of the off-white undergarment, Jack was struck by the brief but powerful image of helping a little boy get undressed for his bath, helping his son –
No, Jack thought firmly, and pulled Johnny's trousers down to his ankles.
By the time Johnny stood naked and shivering a little under the dim electric light, his erection pointing towards the ceiling but not quite scraping his lower belly yet, Jack was giddy and breathless with the effort of self-restraint, sweating and rumpled but still dressed.
"Aren't you going to – " Johnny began uncertainly, all his former self-assurance gathered up on the floor along with his discarded clothing.
"All in good time," Jack said rather shortly, and with a light shove to his sternum sent Johnny reeling back onto the bed. He shrugged off his own braces as he crawled on after him, took Johnny's ankles in his hands and was a little bemused (if somewhat gratified) to find that the lad drew his legs up and apart like celandine petals at dawn without any prompting from Jack at all.
He looked a moment, kneeling between Johnny's legs with his shirt buttons all but flying off in nervous haste, to take in the sight of territory he'd not yet conquered, to drink in Johnny's peculiarly open face, the slight tremble in his thighs from the strain of their position, the way his stomach moved as he breathed, the way his skin looked healthier under electric light than daylight (or perhaps it was that here it contrasted against white sheets instead of dark clothing?).
Jack pulled his own vest off over his head and received a rather pleasant surprise when Johnny's hands rose to his chest to read its contours like Braille. Johnny looked strangely awestruck – Jack supposed it was the oddness of bridging the gap between furtive glances at naked bodies while bathing and the quick, abrupt, furtive fucks behind darkened sheds and in dank outhouses. Nothing furtive about this. Jack bent awkwardly over to kiss him again, and this time Johnny's mouth was eager and alive, his hands skating to the small of Jack's back and crushing their bodies together.
Johnny's cock hot and stiff against Jack's stomach. His hands rough and – longer fingernails than he'd expected – sharp on Jack's back, his shoulders, his neck, his scalp. Hungry hands, starving fingers, and a thirsty mouth.
Jack pulled back. "All in good time," he panted, unbuttoning his trousers. No sooner had he unhooked the relevant hooks than Johnny's hands were on him again, tugging and worrying at his waistband. "Patience," Jack said, as much to himself as to Johnny, and ducked to bury his face against the back of Johnny's thigh.
Johnny made a sound like a hiss of shock when Jack began licking. He tasted familiar (Jack shoved Johnny's hands gently away from his own cock), of sweat, mostly, with an undercurrent of gentlemen's soap almost entirely faded, and that intoxicating more-scent-than-taste of arousal seeping from his pores. Jack's tongue drew fat wet highways through the soft hairs on the underside of his buttocks, circled a lazy whirl around his arsehole and as Johnny said in a very worried voice, "what are you doing?" he began rimming him in earnest.
It was a gesture as much anything else, a demonstration that there was more to this heady business of fucking than hand jobs in privies buggery in stables; an important one that excused the slightly sewagey taste (debates raged in the future involving words like 'tang' and 'spicy' which Jack had always found a little disingenuous; sticking your tongue up someone's arse tasted of shit. The trick was, as an old friend of his had wistfully said, not minding that it tasted of shit). That this gesture resulted in Johnny going boneless and making a sound like a newborn kitten was obviously only an enjoyable side-effect and not the point of the gesture at all.
Jack paused to slide two of his fingers into his mouth and coat them liberally with saliva.
Johnny barely even twitched when Jack slipped them both in together, his body already so relaxed that resistance was nominal at best; he did sigh and grope for his cock again, and Jack was forced to use his spare hand to shove Johnny's away once more. Johnny's hips rippled like a cracked whip, driving him down onto Jack's fingers as his legs splayed even wider, and Jack allowed himself a moment of frustration, a bitten lip, as he didn't lower his head to suck Johnny 'til he came as he so badly wanted to.
He waited instead until Johnny was more or less fucking his hand, until Johnny was clutching at his own hair and chest and making minute sounds with each ragged breath – and removed his fingers. Johnny's eyes flew open; Jack pulled down his trousers and underpants in one smooth, movement and Johnny reached down to pull the cheeks of his arse even further apart.
Holding back was an exercise in levels of willpower Jack didn't know he possessed – Johnny's arsehole was at that moment the single most inviting thing in the universe. It would be so easy to sink himself balls-deep in him, to feel Johnny warm and wet and tight as a glove around him; the sounds he'd make. The weight of Johnny's legs on his shoulders. Collapsing spent and slick over another man's stomach for the first time in – oh, weeks now. But no. No.
Jack held himself back with immense difficulty, and Johnny grabbed impatiently, ineffectively at his waist. "Aren't you going to fuck me now?" Johnny muttered, his words coming out blurred at the edges and just a little whiny.
"No," Jack said, stroking the back of Johnny's leg, briefly eyeballing the not-terribly-discrete bottle of oil on the bedside table (Enid evidently had some number of these highly disreputable parties), "You're going to fuck me now."
He'd thought there was nothing left in Johnny to surprise him, but it seemed the man was his fath – no – but there was. The speed at which he rolled out from under Jack, the force with which he slammed him, face-down, into the mattress – all suggested Jack had wound him up a lot tighter than he'd imagined.
"You'll excuse me if I don't piss about like you do," Johnny said a little roughly, his knee between the back of Jack's thighs like a wedge, oil flying everywhere like particularly indecent rain. "But – oh" his fingers slipped easily inside Jack, momentarily inside Jack – and made him gasp despite himself (because this, the last time of this, had been months ago, nearly a year ago), "I've been patient," he continued, the head of his cock nuzzling Jack's arsehole. Jack swallowed and lifted up, trying to force Johnny down into him. "I have been patiently not even trying to fuck you for four bloody days and you made it so obvious," Johnny all but whined, guiding himself in. "Ah."
Jack echoed him, arching up as Johnny steadied himself by grabbing his shoulder.
"You made it so clear," Johnny whispered, his chest hot against Jack's back, his breath hot by Jack's ear, his voice uneven and his cock like a steel rod inside him. "Watching me all the – un – sodding time," Johnny's teeth rasped against Jack's neck as he muttered, and Jack had to admit he wasn't paying that close attention to the actual words anymore, "did you think I wouldn't notice?"
The next few minutes – maybe five, maybe forty-five – passed as a kind of dynamic montage of sweat, mild pain, intense pleasure, hands, lips, teeth, a litany of anatomy, somewhere between fighting, fucking and even lovemaking.
By the time Jack collapsed into the dishevelled pillows, lying in a small pool of his own come with no thought for the sheets, Johnny sprawled on top of him like a heavy but effective eiderdown, the bite marks on the back of his neck were already beginning to fade.
Johnny slid off him like oil off glass and lay on his back panting a little – Jack took this opportunity to roll onto his back and stretch – and patted Jack in a sort of friendly fashion on the stomach.
"Alright, you won," he said sleepily. Jack smiled at the moulding on the ceiling and shut his eyes but said nothing. Johnny added in an aimless murmur, "Jack Harkness. Were you named for your father?"
"No," said Jack, who had stolen his names from a pilot in 1941, couldn't remember his own and had never met his father anyway.
"Jolly good, that could have been a little delicate," Johnny rambled, rolling over until his arm draped over Jack's diaphragm in exactly the least comfortable spot. "Still, I suppose 'Harkness' is a common enough name."
"What are you babbling about?" Jack asked, feeling his insides flip from warm post-coital soup to frozen suspicion in the blink of an eye.
"My father," Johnny yawned, "the soldier, I mean. The soldier my mother was carrying on with. His name was Jack Harkness too. I thought, when we were introduced, 'that's a funny coincidence and if I play it right that'll be two generations of us carrying on with a Jack Harkness.'"
Three, Jack thought, recalling Lady Diana. Lady Diana was quite hard to forget.
"Not the same one, obviously."
"Er," said Jack. He opened one eye and squinted at the contented face half on and half off his chest, at the red marks on his skin where Jack had occasionally forgotten to be as tender as he'd intended, and thought: oh fuck it. It wasn't like everyone else at the Agency had been so fucking scrupulous in ensuring they didn't strew offspring all over the timeline – one guy even ending up having his granddaughter become his grandmother, which had provided months of locker room humour for the rest of his team. "Actually," he said, toying absently with Johnny's hair, "it was."
"Was what?"
"The same Jack Harkness," Jack said, lacing and unlacing his fingers through Johnny's thick brown locks. "Me."
Johnny snorted. "Don't be absurd. You're not old enough. You can't be a day over thirty-five."
"Hey," Jack protested, a little wounded, then: "I guess I have quite a lot of explaining to do."
1. Research is for people who care.
2. La la la see previous footnote.
3. Yes, Jack, you are still Captain of the Innuendo Squad. Go you.
4. The ancestor, no doubt, of The Unfortunate Welland, in some capacity. If you have no idea who The Unfortunate Welland is, read2soldiersinlove.
PART ONE
The rain was still lurking threateningly about the grounds come Monday, ambushing Jack every time he made a move towards the tennis courts even in jest, and drenching him in a brief but thorough shower when he took the dogs out. He had fundamentally resigned himself to a day of squishy socks and the evocative smell of wet wool in his nostrils when the sun came out in a blaze of glory and nearly blinded him with the thousands of reflections from every puddle.
Dazzled and damp, Jack returned to the house for breakfast and found Lady Diana nursing a hangover. "One too many nightcaps," she explained, looking comical in her dark glasses – especially as she'd still apparently taken the time to set her hair. "No laughing or I shall … visit dire punishments on you. I can't think of any now – too tired – but trust me they will be every bit as ghastly as this headache."
Jack viewed the two places set for breakfast with a discreet eye, and raised his eyebrows at her.
"Worn out, apparently," Lady Diana supplied. "So I have you to myself today. Normally I'd jump at the chance," she didn't sound particularly enthusiastic or sincere, "but – well." She grimaced. "Go and organise the library or something. You're breathing too loudly."
Jack saluted sarcastically and trooped off, making a point of marching as heavily as he could until Lady Diana shouted, "ARSE" after him and flinched at the volume of her own voice.
The library was in a state of continual and advanced disarray – Lady Diana admitted that she'd never really got into the habit of putting books back on any shelf when she'd finished with them, never mind the one they'd come from, and so stack upon stack and slithery pile overlapping scree of hardbacks littered every available flat surface amongst the almost-bare shelves in the high-ceilinged room – but Jack was in no mood for playing librarian. He wasn't sure if he'd ever been in the appropriate mood for a task that involved quite so much tedious shuffling about and caring about order.
Jack made it through most of the maze of papers before something caught his eye – an oversized sheet of yellowing paper spread out over a desk, tucked away at the back of the room. It turned out to be a family tree. Jack assumed it must have been a project of the late Mr. Beckett (his title having temporarily slipped Jack's mind) as Lady Diana showed a refreshing lack of interest in genealogy.
With a rapidly sinking heart he scanned the bottom line of the chart until he found the date he was looking for; there, John Clemens Fairford, Lahore, a date almost exactly nine months after his affair with Ann Parker had ended. Shit.
Jack thumped the family tree in frustration and part of the paper crackled off. There was no guarantee it was the same woman, he thought desperately, and even if it was – she was married, and from what he remembered of smirking politely at her cuckolded husband, to a hale and virile gentleman (with enormous moustaches of the kind Jack could never grow). It was entirely possible that, after his little incident on the train had forced him to flee to Calcutta, that 'Ann Parker' had thrown herself back into her marriage by way of consolation. Not just possibly but wholly likely.
He gently relaxed his clenched fists into looser shapes and took a steadying breath. It was fine. He was not littering up time with his illegitimate brood. For all he knew the thing that had rendered him unable to die had also left him infertile – it would after all be poetic justice that he be incapable of creating life now that he couldn't lose his own.
Jack backed away from the chart as though it was an adder he'd disturbed and decided that his time would be better spent – he looked out of the window at the miserable sweat-inducing drizzle – clearing weeds from around the outhouses at the bottom of the field.
Returning to the house around five to change for dinner, he was greeted with an exasperated, "I had no idea the library was so muddy. Is that goose-grass in your hair?" from his patron, but no real issue was raised over his absence. In fact, she looked positively refreshed to have been free of him for the majority of the daylight hours.
Jack bathed slowly, until the water in his tub was quite tepid, and dressed just as sluggishly. The bow-tie amused him, and he spent a moment or two informing the mirror that his name was Bond, James Bond – once he'd finally knotted it correctly. Or thought he had – he stepped out into the corridor just as Staveson was passing, and the old man groaned as though Jack had punched him in the stomach, and made him stand still while he retied it.
Lady Diana seized upon him before he could get to the bottom of the stairs. "They're not here yet," she muttered, which Jack had rather guessed, since she wasn't down there making nice to them. "But I want to give you a friendly warning – do not fuck this up for my nephew. The Cunninghams are vulgar people and frankly I'd rather not associate with them at all, but they are very wealthy and God only knows this family is need serious need of a financial kick in the posterior, by whatever means necessary. The old man has fifteen glue, varnish and polish factories all churning out goods – " she gave him a slightly hunted look, " – he will go on about that for hours. Bloody hours. His daughter has air for brains and her laugh goes right through my head but she's pretty enough and Johnny will blasted well get engaged to her –"
"Does he know this yet?"
"He's been primed," Lady Diana said grimly, "and you are to tell the Cunninghams you served with him. He saved your life or something of that ilk."
"I'm his character reference?" Jack asked, a little delighted by the sheer underhandedness of it all.
"Bingo." Lady Diana patted him on both upper arms like a mafia don. "If you want to continue living in my house, using up all my hot water and emptying the larder at all hours of the night, Jack, you'll co-operate."
Jack kissed her abruptly on the mouth, and she batted him hastily away. "Not in public, you ass."
"Operation Get Johnny Married is go, ma'am."
"Don't you ma'am me," she cocked her head. "Hear that?"
"Car engine?"
"They have a brand new motorcar," she sounded utterly disgusted. "Absurd. As if the roads around here were remotely suited to it." Lady Diana adjusted her stole and rapped Jack in the chest with her knuckles. "Remember. Best behaviour. Make my boy look good."
"Yes, Lady Diana," Jack saluted, and she sighed and hobbled down the stairs at a speed that belied her uneven gait.
The Cunninghams were a strangely-matched menagerie, Jack thought as he was introduced to them. Albert was a frumpy, stolid beach ball of a man who'd tried to grow a patriarch's whiskers and failed, from the looks of things, and had to settle for a toothbrush on his upper lip instead. Most unfashionable (Jack currently sported a pencil, the cutting edge of facial hair), and he looked like he'd learned his manners from a book at short notice.
His wife, the lovely Mrs. Sarah Cunningham, gave the very definite impression of showgirl done good. It was there in the way she moved her head and the way she wore her make-up – thick, as though she was used to applying it herself to withstand the glare of footlights and stand out in a dim club.
Their daughter – Jack could almost see Johnny's soul shrivelling up in horror as the two were introduced – was spot on eighteen, a bottle-blonde with thick eyelashes and a look of mania gleaming under her modestly-dressed exterior. She looked like she wanted to cut loose and do something irrational. She looked like she was itching for a cigarette if not more. She looked like she belonged in parties in London where half the party-goers got arrested for sodomy and indecency; in short, Elizabeth Cunningham looked like Jack's kind of girl, and like she was all wrong for a man who still had the creeping horrors every night.
He introduced himself politely and distantly, but he saw her flush and twitch and smile at him with a look of distinct interest that had been absent when she greeted Johnny. Fuck. Lady Diana was going to pulverise him.
"Fish-based and horse-based so far," Mr. Cunningham said over the soup course, "but we're looking into oil derivatives and expansion into lubricants for engines. The mechanised age is here to stay, in my opinion."
Elizabeth fidgeted in her seat and all but yawned into her glass of water; beside her, Johnny gazed miserably through his soup as though hypnotised by it; Lady Diana made a pained noise of encouragement to Mr. Cunningham, and to Jack's left Mrs. Cunningham asked him with a sad-eyed smile if he had ever been to New York, and how he found life in England.
With a healthy (and perhaps unwise) dollop of the usual charm Jack told her he'd never been to New York, he came from Chicago (pulling names out of nowhere), and he began singing England's fulsome and not entirely deserved praises as he kicked Johnny's foot under the table, just as Lady Diana pinched him surreptitiously in the side.
Johnny jerked upright guiltily and asked Elizabeth to pass the pepper. It was, Jack thought wearily, a start at least.
The fish course did a little more for the dinner table conversation: showing a surprising degree of sensitivity, Mr. Cunningham diverted the topic from fish-based adhesive manufacturing and onto the business of motorcar maintenance, a subject on which Elizabeth proved to be quite passionate and often loud enough that Jack felt her mother's leg whip out under the table to catch her in the shin. With this amount of foot-based conversational guidance going on, they were sure to all be too crippled to socialise by the end of the meal.
Jack watched Johnny strike up cautious conversation about the merits of the Bugatti Type 23 over the Delage CO, heaved a sigh of relief and buried himself in the business of eating. Eating, and trying to avoid Mrs. Cunningham's inviting hand on his thigh.
After-dinner drinks served as the warning beacon for the downhill turn of the evening – Johnny mumbled something about needing to step outside for some air, his face flushed, and Jack followed him without caution or excuse.
He discovered the young man just beside the ugly pillars that flanked the front door, vomiting explosively into a rose bush. A moment or two of back rubbing later Johnny was composed enough to croak, "I told you I couldn't hold my drink," and sink onto his toes in a wobbly crouch.
"How much did you have?" Jack asked, sitting down beside him on the step in a manner intended to be responsible and comforting and not at all paternal.
"Not much. Less than you."
"I have a cast-iron stomach. You don't want to try keeping up with me."
"I had noticed," Johnny passed his hands over his face, unsticking his sweaty hair from his forehead. "At least I kept my mouth shut, eh?"
"Oh?" Jack asked carefully.
"Yes," Johnny said, slurring just enough that Jack know the confidence he was about to receive was one he shouldn't be hearing, "before we came over mother got blind at the embassy – absolutely rotten, and told me – " he slid down on his heels until his back touched the pillar behind him and his head bounced off it with a crack like a rifle shot – seemingly without him noticing, "She told me I'm a bastard." He covered his mouth with his hand. Jack couldn't tell if he was ashamed of the word or nauseous again. "Some soldier, she said." He looked wistful.
"How did she know you're not … you know … your father's?"
Johnny made a face. "Apparently my father – " he hiccupped painfully, "an otherwise excellent man, mark you – has a little bit of a problem with the old chap." Johnny demonstrated precisely what problem with a surprisingly vulgar gesture involving a limp wrist. "Not what I wanted for my nineteenth birthday. Happy – hic – birthday, Johnny, you're ille –hic- git – ti – ma - … a bastard."
"But the Colonel – "
"Long as no one else knows, I'm his son, right? He wanted one," Johnny said, leaning back again and nearly missing the pillar this time. Jack grabbed him by the elbow to steady him and ended up putting a supportive arm across his shoulders. They sat this way for some time, the cold night air blowing through Jack's hair and stirring Johnny's.
"I say, Mr. Harkness," called a dampened voice from the doorway. Elizabeth Cunningham peered around at them and said with a glint in her eye that would have showed up in a coal cellar, "I say. D'you and your friend want to come to a rather terrific party?"
Jack glanced at Johnny, who had his eyes shut and looked positively deathsome, and was about to tell her regretfully that they'd have to pass on the offer when Johnny, without cracking open an eyelid, muttered:
"Please yes dear god."
"Are you sure?" Jack asked, peering at Johnny's pale, sweating face with genuine concern. "You don't look up to it."
"I'm sick of the quiet out here," Johnny explained, doing little to break it, "I want to go somewhere with dancing and people who aren't looking at me as though I'm contagious."
"That's the spirit," Elizabeth said cheerfully. "It's at Stourhead. The way I drive we'll be there in two hours at the most."
"You're driving?" Jack asked, helping Johnny to his feet. The lad's skin was clammy and his heart racing. Jack had never seen someone take a few drinks so badly before.
"It's my car. Of course I'm driving." Elizabeth produced a pair of diving goggles from her handbag. "I do hope that's not going to be a problem, Mr. Harkness. I didn't have you pegged for a kill-joy at all. I don't want to have to leave you here to your own miserable devices."
"Do your parents know you're taking their car?" Jack asked warily, sliding into the passenger side as Johnny sprawled over the rear seats in a rather endearingly ungainly manner.
"Of course not. It wouldn't be half as fun if they knew!" Elizabeth snorted. As the car began to coast gently down the approach she added, "We shall have to stop before we get to the house so I can change out of this frumpy old rag – it just wouldn't be the thing to show up at one of Enid's evenings looking like an old maid, it's just unthinkable."
"Stop where?" Johnny asked from behind them. Jack turned. He seemed to be benefiting from the cold wind on his face.
"A bush, a tree – " Elizabeth made a dismissive gestured and clamped her hand back on the wheel. "- does it matter?"
"A bush?" Johnny said faintly.
"I'm sure that, both being perfect gentlemen, you'll avert your gaze while I whip this old thing off and put on something a little more daring."
"Perfect gentlemen," Jack echoed. Elizabeth's hand was heavy on his leg.
"Jack, be a darling and have a look in my handbag? There should be a gold compact with a swan on it in the front compartment. I rather fancy some cocaine."
"While driving?" Jack asked incredulously, rooting about in her back and feeling very silly doing it.
"It's medicinal!" Elizabeth said without even an attempt at being convincing. "It helps me concentrate."
"I don't doubt it," said Jack, who did. "But what I meant was – won't it get blown everywhere by the wind?"
"Dash it, I hadn't thought of that. Open it below the screen, there? That's right. Now get up a spoonful – bigger than that, I'm not an infant! – and press your thumb over it so – "
Jack did as he was told, and by a curious process not wholly unlike feeding peas to an obstinate and finicky toddler, got the required amount of cocaine to their driver.
For the rest of the journey Jack learnt an awful lot about Elizabeth, Elizabeth's stridently-held opinions (who knew it was possible to be passionate about being undecided?), Elizabeth's friend Molly ("She's American too. Maybe you know her? I can't remember her last name but she's simply divine, you must have met,") who was a singer, and most of all about Elizabeth's hair-raising driving. He cast occasional envious glances back at a dozing Johnny in the brief moments when Elizabeth paused for breath.
He let her hand crawl all over his leg like a stoned arachnid and leapt out of the car to push the machine out of the ditch Elizabeth had driven it into – twice. The third time it was a field, mercifully empty of livestock, and Johnny came down to help, and they both got plastered in mud up to the knee.
"Marvellous," Elizabeth giggled as they set off again, "this is just perfect! I can tell Enid I found you both growing in a field of soldiers and plucked you up for her party."
Johnny and Jack exchanged a pained glance but held their peace.
They stopped inside the grounds but outside the house so that Elizabeth could dart behind a spectacular folly and emerge twenty minutes later wearing a knee-length thing in shimmering gold that made her look like a twelve-year-old boy in make-up. Jack applauded nonetheless.
Their guide slapped the doorknocker impatiently, cigarette-holder poking out of her mouth like a porcupine's quill, and the door was answered by a tired-looking footman and a drunk-looking woman in her late twenties who was carrying a small dog. "Lizzie! Splendid! We were just getting started and wondering how fashionably detained you were going to be. Just wouldn't have been the same without you, darling."
Elizabeth simpered unexpectedly; Jack had not pegged her for the kind of woman who simpered. "I brought some chaps along. I'm afraid they're a bit grubby from my driving – "
"Well, at least they're still alive," Enid drawled. "So I suppose you must be improving." She waved an admonishing finger under the young lady's nose and smirked. "You'd go a deal better if you opened your eyes when taking corners."
"Oh, where's the thrill?" Elizabeth flapped the advice away with her cigarette smoke. "Anyway, this is Jack Harkness – "
Jack dipped to kiss Enid's hand and the small dog growled at him, so he made a big show of taking the little bastard's forepaw and kissing that, too. It showed him his teeth. Jack showed his back.
"- and – blast! I've forgotten your name."
"Fairford. Johnny Fairford."
"How very excellent," Enid pulled them inside and shut the door, raising her voice to an immediate wall-shaking bellow. "GILLARD! Where are the drinks for my new guests? Hop along, you old goat."
"None for me, thanks," Johnny said. "Just point me at the music."
"This way," Enid took Johnny's hand and dragged him down the hall like a dog on a lead. Trapped between her arm and her breast, the tiny Yorkshire terrier began yapping indignantly. Jack took Elizabeth's arm and followed.
There came a room filled with cigarette smoke and the scent, under this, of rose water. Somewhere in the gloom two string instruments – a bass and a piano – were engaged in a deadly musical battle while a giggling trumpet refereed; now and then Jack caught a glimpse of the musicians but the partygoers for the most part blocked his view. They wore suits and costumes, and very little at all: one young lady had apparently come as a Muse and was lounging about with one breast hanging out, and a man of maybe nineteen was darting about dressed as Cupid, his heavily made-up eyelids drooping narcotically over dark brown eyes.
Jack found himself filled with a feeling like a kind of contented homecoming. This was his natural environment. Throw in an orgy a little later and perhaps a gunfight and it would be a truly swinging party.
As the acoustic battlefield settled into some epileptic jitter that was only dance music if you had five legs, Jack seized Johnny by the hand and said, "care to dance?"
And dance they did. Johnny danced like he'd been taught to dance by people who weren't meant to be teaching him anything, and later learnt to not quite cover it up with something more decent – he looked like the two-way cultural fight of colonialism embodied in arm movements. He looked good. Jack forgot himself and forgot anachronism and just threw himself into the music like a lunatic against an asylum wall, every flat and squeak and bum note just another way of touching rhythm. He danced until sweat stuck his shirt squarely to his back, until his feet felt like wings.
Until the song, or approximation thereof, ended, and one of the musicians wandered off to stuff more "naughty salt" up his nose, and the remaining two couldn't keep up quite the same tempo even with guests tapping encouragement on whatever flat surfaces they could find.
Johnny put a hand against the wall to steady himself, a movement which would have been more effective had said wall not been eight feet away, and said unsteadily, "I think I need to lie down now."
Jack refrained from saying "I told you this would happen" and instead grabbed Enid unceremoniously by the elbow as she passed. Her rotten little dog snarled at him but they both ignored it. "Do you have a guest room we could – uh. That doesn't sound very good."
Enid smirked – it seemed to be her only expression – and said, "up the larger stairs, third on the left, has a bolt on the door for precisely guests like you Mr. – Harken, was it?"
"Something like that," Jack said with an appalling smile, not bothering to correct her on either front. He got a hold of Johnny's upper arm instead and gave it a tug. "Come on. I found you somewhere to sleep it off."
Johnny shambled and bowed at the knees but otherwise made his way relatively unsupported – Jack kept a steadying arm on his shoulder, just in case – and leant heavily on the wall while Jack wrestled the stiff door open.
"There," he said, shutting the door behind them. "I should probably get back down to the …" he didn't want to, of course, but there was the not incurring the volcanic wrath of Lady Diana to think of. He trailed off, though, because Johnny had straightened up and tossed his hair out of his eyes, looking the very picture of sobriety if not of sanity.
The change was sudden and electric, and Jack permitted himself a low groan; things like this tended to go one of two ways, and he really hoped it was heading for the ending with the sweaty grunting nudity and not the one where Johnny peeled his face off and turned out to be something that needed shooting before it laid eggs in Jack's spinal column. He was quite fed up with that ending.
"I thought you wanted to lie down," he pointed out carefully.
"Eventually," Johnny said, taking off his dinner jacket and throwing it at the chair by the bed. He gave Jack the kind of smile that Jack recognised from that time he'd accidentally-on-purpose time-looped himself and ended up having good but extremely narcissistic sex with himself.
"Oh I see," Jack said, flashing the same one back. "What happened to 'couldn't possibly' and 'psychiatric doctors'?"
"I just gave a very convincing performance of still being blind drunk, and you half-carried me up the stairs," Johnny said, holding Jack's gaze as he moved closer. "If tongues do get excitable they'll say you took advantage of an inebriated and confused young man," Johnny went on with a mock sigh of pain, "I am frequently drunk and confused, and taken advantage of, Jack. They'll understand. You might not be so lucky."
Jack shrugged and put his hands on Johnny's hips, pulling him across the remaining distance with a gentle but deliberate tug. "I have my own ways of avoiding trouble." He peeled one of Johnny's braces off his shoulder and laid his hand where it had rested, cupped his fingers around the back of Johnny's neck, danced agonisingly slow patterns on the soft skin there, and pulled Johnny's mouth towards him.
Johnny stiffened. "I don't kiss – "
"You do now," Jack said, and kissed him. He put everything into it – A Jack Harkness Knicker-Dropper Glory, they called them the first time he'd been around in the second World War. He pressed his lips to Johnny's, slid his hand from Johnny's hip to the small of his back, half-opened his mouth and – bingo – there was the buckle in Johnny's knees, there was the surrender in his mouth.
Jack softened up, pulled away a little, and was rewarded with an open mouth and a delicately probing tongue, and just the barest hint of a moan into his mouth. Jack pulled back abruptly, hands still in place, leaving Johnny temporarily gaping for him, and whispered against his cheek, "Let me guess, all those other drunken moments: brief and hard against the wall of the mess? You're a fool, Johnny." He snatched a swift kiss and once again left the man chasing his mouth as he pulled away. "Did you never want anything more than that?"
"There is nothing more for men like us," Johnny said a little sadly, his hands working on untucking Jack's shirt which, without unbuttoning his high-waisted trousers, was not going to be a magnificent success.
Jack seized Johnny's wrists in his hands and bashed them together. "You," he said, his mouth brushing Johnny's with each letter, "are so wrong about that I can hardly tell you." He released Johnny's wrists, plucked the other brace from his shoulder and stood back (keeping himself from burying his hands in the man's hair, his lips in his neck and his hips against his arse was proving an effort of supreme will). "Undress," he said pleasantly.
"All of it?" Johnny looked perplexed.
"I'm not about to make love to your trousers. Yes, all of it," Jack said, and nearly inhaled his lower lip as he bit on it, trapping the sigh as Johnny unbuttoned down over his chest and stomach, removed his collar and cast it aside, and undid the first of his trouser buttons; as he revealed the curve of his breastbone swathed in vest, the almost-concave expanse of his stomach and – as he struggled away his sleeves – the pale, slightly bony hemispheres of his shoulders. His lightly-freckled collarbone. His throat. Jack swallowed hard.
"Why must I – "
Jack stopped his mouth with another kiss, which unfortunately also put paid to any more of this bizarre and clumsy strip-tease. He undid Johnny's trousers himself, forcing his hands steady, forcing himself to take it slow and calm instead of bashing their hips together, instead of sliding a hot hand inside his underwear the minute he could and making a beeline for Johnny's cock. Jack untucked his vest, yanked it upwards, and as they broke the kiss, as Johnny raised his arms above his head to help Jack wriggle him out of the off-white undergarment, Jack was struck by the brief but powerful image of helping a little boy get undressed for his bath, helping his son –
No, Jack thought firmly, and pulled Johnny's trousers down to his ankles.
By the time Johnny stood naked and shivering a little under the dim electric light, his erection pointing towards the ceiling but not quite scraping his lower belly yet, Jack was giddy and breathless with the effort of self-restraint, sweating and rumpled but still dressed.
"Aren't you going to – " Johnny began uncertainly, all his former self-assurance gathered up on the floor along with his discarded clothing.
"All in good time," Jack said rather shortly, and with a light shove to his sternum sent Johnny reeling back onto the bed. He shrugged off his own braces as he crawled on after him, took Johnny's ankles in his hands and was a little bemused (if somewhat gratified) to find that the lad drew his legs up and apart like celandine petals at dawn without any prompting from Jack at all.
He looked a moment, kneeling between Johnny's legs with his shirt buttons all but flying off in nervous haste, to take in the sight of territory he'd not yet conquered, to drink in Johnny's peculiarly open face, the slight tremble in his thighs from the strain of their position, the way his stomach moved as he breathed, the way his skin looked healthier under electric light than daylight (or perhaps it was that here it contrasted against white sheets instead of dark clothing?).
Jack pulled his own vest off over his head and received a rather pleasant surprise when Johnny's hands rose to his chest to read its contours like Braille. Johnny looked strangely awestruck – Jack supposed it was the oddness of bridging the gap between furtive glances at naked bodies while bathing and the quick, abrupt, furtive fucks behind darkened sheds and in dank outhouses. Nothing furtive about this. Jack bent awkwardly over to kiss him again, and this time Johnny's mouth was eager and alive, his hands skating to the small of Jack's back and crushing their bodies together.
Johnny's cock hot and stiff against Jack's stomach. His hands rough and – longer fingernails than he'd expected – sharp on Jack's back, his shoulders, his neck, his scalp. Hungry hands, starving fingers, and a thirsty mouth.
Jack pulled back. "All in good time," he panted, unbuttoning his trousers. No sooner had he unhooked the relevant hooks than Johnny's hands were on him again, tugging and worrying at his waistband. "Patience," Jack said, as much to himself as to Johnny, and ducked to bury his face against the back of Johnny's thigh.
Johnny made a sound like a hiss of shock when Jack began licking. He tasted familiar (Jack shoved Johnny's hands gently away from his own cock), of sweat, mostly, with an undercurrent of gentlemen's soap almost entirely faded, and that intoxicating more-scent-than-taste of arousal seeping from his pores. Jack's tongue drew fat wet highways through the soft hairs on the underside of his buttocks, circled a lazy whirl around his arsehole and as Johnny said in a very worried voice, "what are you doing?" he began rimming him in earnest.
It was a gesture as much anything else, a demonstration that there was more to this heady business of fucking than hand jobs in privies buggery in stables; an important one that excused the slightly sewagey taste (debates raged in the future involving words like 'tang' and 'spicy' which Jack had always found a little disingenuous; sticking your tongue up someone's arse tasted of shit. The trick was, as an old friend of his had wistfully said, not minding that it tasted of shit). That this gesture resulted in Johnny going boneless and making a sound like a newborn kitten was obviously only an enjoyable side-effect and not the point of the gesture at all.
Jack paused to slide two of his fingers into his mouth and coat them liberally with saliva.
Johnny barely even twitched when Jack slipped them both in together, his body already so relaxed that resistance was nominal at best; he did sigh and grope for his cock again, and Jack was forced to use his spare hand to shove Johnny's away once more. Johnny's hips rippled like a cracked whip, driving him down onto Jack's fingers as his legs splayed even wider, and Jack allowed himself a moment of frustration, a bitten lip, as he didn't lower his head to suck Johnny 'til he came as he so badly wanted to.
He waited instead until Johnny was more or less fucking his hand, until Johnny was clutching at his own hair and chest and making minute sounds with each ragged breath – and removed his fingers. Johnny's eyes flew open; Jack pulled down his trousers and underpants in one smooth, movement and Johnny reached down to pull the cheeks of his arse even further apart.
Holding back was an exercise in levels of willpower Jack didn't know he possessed – Johnny's arsehole was at that moment the single most inviting thing in the universe. It would be so easy to sink himself balls-deep in him, to feel Johnny warm and wet and tight as a glove around him; the sounds he'd make. The weight of Johnny's legs on his shoulders. Collapsing spent and slick over another man's stomach for the first time in – oh, weeks now. But no. No.
Jack held himself back with immense difficulty, and Johnny grabbed impatiently, ineffectively at his waist. "Aren't you going to fuck me now?" Johnny muttered, his words coming out blurred at the edges and just a little whiny.
"No," Jack said, stroking the back of Johnny's leg, briefly eyeballing the not-terribly-discrete bottle of oil on the bedside table (Enid evidently had some number of these highly disreputable parties), "You're going to fuck me now."
He'd thought there was nothing left in Johnny to surprise him, but it seemed the man was his fath – no – but there was. The speed at which he rolled out from under Jack, the force with which he slammed him, face-down, into the mattress – all suggested Jack had wound him up a lot tighter than he'd imagined.
"You'll excuse me if I don't piss about like you do," Johnny said a little roughly, his knee between the back of Jack's thighs like a wedge, oil flying everywhere like particularly indecent rain. "But – oh" his fingers slipped easily inside Jack, momentarily inside Jack – and made him gasp despite himself (because this, the last time of this, had been months ago, nearly a year ago), "I've been patient," he continued, the head of his cock nuzzling Jack's arsehole. Jack swallowed and lifted up, trying to force Johnny down into him. "I have been patiently not even trying to fuck you for four bloody days and you made it so obvious," Johnny all but whined, guiding himself in. "Ah."
Jack echoed him, arching up as Johnny steadied himself by grabbing his shoulder.
"You made it so clear," Johnny whispered, his chest hot against Jack's back, his breath hot by Jack's ear, his voice uneven and his cock like a steel rod inside him. "Watching me all the – un – sodding time," Johnny's teeth rasped against Jack's neck as he muttered, and Jack had to admit he wasn't paying that close attention to the actual words anymore, "did you think I wouldn't notice?"
The next few minutes – maybe five, maybe forty-five – passed as a kind of dynamic montage of sweat, mild pain, intense pleasure, hands, lips, teeth, a litany of anatomy, somewhere between fighting, fucking and even lovemaking.
By the time Jack collapsed into the dishevelled pillows, lying in a small pool of his own come with no thought for the sheets, Johnny sprawled on top of him like a heavy but effective eiderdown, the bite marks on the back of his neck were already beginning to fade.
Johnny slid off him like oil off glass and lay on his back panting a little – Jack took this opportunity to roll onto his back and stretch – and patted Jack in a sort of friendly fashion on the stomach.
"Alright, you won," he said sleepily. Jack smiled at the moulding on the ceiling and shut his eyes but said nothing. Johnny added in an aimless murmur, "Jack Harkness. Were you named for your father?"
"No," said Jack, who had stolen his names from a pilot in 1941, couldn't remember his own and had never met his father anyway.
"Jolly good, that could have been a little delicate," Johnny rambled, rolling over until his arm draped over Jack's diaphragm in exactly the least comfortable spot. "Still, I suppose 'Harkness' is a common enough name."
"What are you babbling about?" Jack asked, feeling his insides flip from warm post-coital soup to frozen suspicion in the blink of an eye.
"My father," Johnny yawned, "the soldier, I mean. The soldier my mother was carrying on with. His name was Jack Harkness too. I thought, when we were introduced, 'that's a funny coincidence and if I play it right that'll be two generations of us carrying on with a Jack Harkness.'"
Three, Jack thought, recalling Lady Diana. Lady Diana was quite hard to forget.
"Not the same one, obviously."
"Er," said Jack. He opened one eye and squinted at the contented face half on and half off his chest, at the red marks on his skin where Jack had occasionally forgotten to be as tender as he'd intended, and thought: oh fuck it. It wasn't like everyone else at the Agency had been so fucking scrupulous in ensuring they didn't strew offspring all over the timeline – one guy even ending up having his granddaughter become his grandmother, which had provided months of locker room humour for the rest of his team. "Actually," he said, toying absently with Johnny's hair, "it was."
"Was what?"
"The same Jack Harkness," Jack said, lacing and unlacing his fingers through Johnny's thick brown locks. "Me."
Johnny snorted. "Don't be absurd. You're not old enough. You can't be a day over thirty-five."
"Hey," Jack protested, a little wounded, then: "I guess I have quite a lot of explaining to do."
1. Research is for people who care.
2. La la la see previous footnote.
3. Yes, Jack, you are still Captain of the Innuendo Squad. Go you.
4. The ancestor, no doubt, of The Unfortunate Welland, in some capacity. If you have no idea who The Unfortunate Welland is, read
2soldiersinlove.
